Collective Moral Obligations: ‘We-Reasoning’ and the Perspective of the Deliberating Agent

Abstract

Together we can achieve things that we could never do on our own. In fact, there are sheer endless opportunities for producing morally desirable outcomes together with others. Unsurprisingly, scholars have been finding the idea of collective moral obligations intriguing. Yet, there is little agreement among scholars on the nature of such obligations and on the extent to which their existence might force us to adjust existing theories of moral obligation. What interests me in this paper is the perspective of the moral deliberating agent who faces a collective-action problem, i.e., the type of reasoning she employs when deciding how to act. I hope to show that agents have collective obligations precisely when they are required to employ 'we-reasoning', a type of reasoning that differs from I-mode, best-response reasoning. More precisely, two (or more) individual agents have a collective moral obligation to do x if x is an option for action that is only collectively available and each has sufficient reason to rank x highest out of the options available to them.

The Epistemology of Group Duties: What We Know and What We Ought to do

“…On a different note, to the extent that the trail riders are in fact a collective and therefore incur group-based duties, there is a significant amount of agreement between Collins' and my account as well as several other accounts in the literature (Aas 2015;Björnsson 2014;Pinkert 2014;Schwenkenbecher 2014Schwenkenbecher , 2019Wringe 2005Wringe , 2010Wringe , 2016. Like Collins, all these authors agree that in a case such as the one described above there is a collective duty to do what is best and group members must perform those actions that form part of (or are constitutive of) a collectively available action or outcome.…”

“…What if we had done the exact same thing without talking to one another, each just taking cues from the others' actions or simply inferring our individual courses of action from what we perceived to be collectively optimal? If there is a morally optimal pattern of actions that is salient, on my view, we can be jointly obligated even if we cannot communicate with the other members of our group (Schwenkenbecher 2019(Schwenkenbecher , 2020b.…”

“…The preceding discussion suggests that an epistemic approach to determining group duties and deliberative strategies may well be preferable to an ontological approach. I have proposed such an approach elsewhere (Schwenkenbecher 2019(Schwenkenbecher , 2020b and have briefly hinted at it above. I argue that we should approach these questions from the perspective of the deliberating agent: "… two (or more) agents hold duties collectively when they each have reason to consider the collective option best, to include it in their set of options, and to actually take steps towards acting on that option.…”

“…Philosophers have spent considerable energy on analyzing small-scale cases of impromptu collective assistance among random bystanders, for instance (Aas 2015;Collins 2013Collins , 2019Goodin 2012;Held 1970;Schwenkenbecher 2014Schwenkenbecher , 2019. Conceptually even more challenging are those large-scale moral problems that we could substantially improve through distributive collective action (Schwenkenbecher 2020a)changing our day-to-day activities and adopting certain collective behavioural patterns (such as reducing household waste and plastic usage to address the problem of plastic pollution of oceans and waterways).…”

Structural Injustice and Massively Shared Obligations

“…It is circumstantial where, as a matter of fact (but not as a matter of principle), an action (or outcome) cannot be performed (or produced) by one person alone, for instance, if it takes two or more people to lift a heavy object. 51 Where it takes two or more agents to address some morally significant problem, as in Cullity's rescue case above, it seems that the capacity principle, or 'ought' implies 'can', is not met. If neither agent can resolve the problem, it appears as though neither has a duty to do so, which is counterintuitive.…”